Named the "Best Blog" by Parent & Child Magazine, this popular mom blog chronicles the wonderful mundaneness of a Philadelphia stay-at-home mom's life with four small children including twins in episodic form. Recurrent topics include adoption, multiples, Fifth Disease, Crohn's Disease and pregnancy, and academia.

February 5, 2011

Mystery of Life # 423

There is a park by our house that has three jungle gyms, a basketball court, and a public restroom with an electric hand dryer.

Explain this to me:

Why, when my kids have all of these toys at their disposal, do they (and all their friends) prefer to play with the dead bird carcass?

The jungle gyms, the basketball court, and the public restroom are always there. The dead bird is new, different, and fascinating. How often do you get a chance to see an animal up close, without fear that it will bite you of run away? Seeing how the feathers and the limbs sit differently in death than in life. With trash, watching how it changes as it decomposed and disintegrates. Kids don't know enough about germs and diseases to be afraid, so I can totally see how that is interesting.

With presents, it is feeling the textures and hearing the noises associated with the destruction of wrapping paper - something that you are allowed to completely tear apart and destroy without getting into trouble. The gift that it contained will still be yours later, but the paper and boxes are going to disappear probably within the day.

When I was in elementry school (in the primary grades (3rd grade and under) I created my own "neighborhood animal burial ground" next to my neighbor's driveway and collected the neighborhood's dead rats, birds, broken eggs, lizards, misc. body parts, whatever, made little crosses and crucifixes out of sticks, twigs or used Popsicle sticks and buried them, much to the horror of my elderly neighbor, who complained repeatedly to my mother. I even was so nice as to steal my mother's sharpies and write on the sticks, "Here lies a dead bird" "Dead rat" "Lizard guts squished by car" so everyone would know what exactly was in this graveyard next to the old hag's driveway.

What can I say? We were cool. We also needed to wash our hands ALOT MORE in retrospect...

We found a dead, frozen goose in our yard last week, after the snow storm. My daughter was very unhappy that I got rid of it before she had a chance to finish investigating it. She was also bewildered that I made her wash her hands. Sheesh.